Open URL

Open files, folders, web URLs, and search queries from anywhere in Sublime Text — and a lot more besides.

• Open URL — the original: open the file/folder/URL under the cursor.
• Select URL — expand the cursor to a URL/path region and copy it to the clipboard.
• Copy Deep Link — copy a path:line:/regex/ link pointing at the cursor.
• Copy Transformed Path — copy the current file path through a user-supplied shell transform (clipboard normalizers, anonymizers, etc.).
• Paste Relative Path — paste a clipboard path as the shortest of relative / ~/... / absolute, with markdown backtick wrapping.

Install

Look for Open URL in Package Control.

Quick start

Put the cursor inside a file path, folder path, URL, or word and run Open URL:

• ctrl+u on macOS
• ctrl+alt+u on Linux/Windows
• right-click → Open URL
• alt + double-click
• shift+cmd+p → Open URL

Try it on these:

$HOME/Desktop
https://news.ycombinator.com
google.com
search_for_me

How Open URL resolves what you select

After expanding the selection (using delimiters), Open URL tries the following in order. The first match wins.

1. File — opens it in Sublime, or shows a menu (edit / reveal / new window / system open).
2. Folder — shows a menu (new window / reveal / add to project).
3. Web URL (e.g. google.com or https://example.com) — opens in your browser.
4. other_custom_commands match — passes the text to whatever shell command you've configured.
5. Fallback — show the modify-or-search panel, populated from web_searchers.

Paths can be absolute, relative to the current file, or relative to the project root. Env vars and ~ are expanded. The selection can be tweaked further with URL/Path Transforms.

Commands

All default keybindings can be silenced by setting open_url.disable_default_key_bindings: true in your User Preferences.sublime-settings.

Open URL: Skip Menu

Looks for Open URL: Skip Menu in the Command Palette, or bind it directly:

{ "keys": ["your+key+binding"], "command": "open_url", "args": { "show_menu": false } }

This opens files for editing, or reveals folders, without showing the action menu.

Open URL: Use Input

Prompts for a path or URL, then runs Open URL on whatever you type. Handy when nothing's selected and you want to navigate by name.

Deep Links

Open URL recognizes “deep link” suffixes attached to a path with a colon, so you can jump to a specific spot inside a file. All forms work both ways: Open URL navigates to them, and Open URL: Copy Deep Link generates them for the cursor or selection.

The combined :LINE:/regex/ form is what Copy Deep Link generates by default. The line number anchors the navigation; the regex (or quoted text) is a hint that improves precision when lines have shifted.

In generated regexes, words are joined by a literal space for readability. Leading indentation becomes ^\s* (so re-indenting the line doesn't break the anchor), and a gap that isn't a single plain space — a tab, or a run of spaces — becomes \s+.

Copy Deep Link output

Set deep_link_line_number_only: true in your settings to drop the regex/search part and emit (and parse) line-number-only deep links — useful if you find loose regex anchors more annoying than helpful.

Pasting deep links

Open URL: Paste Relative Path preserves the suffix when pasting a clipboard path. So if your clipboard contains /abs/path/notes.md:11:/^foo/, pasting from a file in the same project yields ../notes.md:11:/^foo/ (with the suffix intact).

Multiple cursors and multi-line selections

Open URL works with multiple cursors — every cursor is processed in parallel and the menu is skipped (treated like Skip Menu).

It also works with a single selection that spans multiple non-empty lines: each non-empty line is opened independently. So selecting

https://example.com/a
https://example.com/b
~/notes.md:42

and running Open URL opens all three.

Custom commands

Open URL has three settings that drive the action menus:

• file_custom_commands — actions when the resolved path is a file.
• folder_custom_commands — actions when the resolved path is a folder.
• other_custom_commands — actions for text that's neither a file/folder nor a web URL.

Each entry is an object with these fields:

Example: copy a file's path to the clipboard.

"file_custom_commands": [
  { "label": "copy path", "commands": "printf '$url' | pbcopy" }
]

Example: open a folder in iTerm.

"folder_custom_commands": [
  { "label": "open in iTerm", "os": "osx", "commands": ["open", "-a", "iTerm"] }
]

Example: run a shell script in a paused terminal window.

"file_custom_commands": [
  {
    "label": "run",
    "pattern": "\\.sh$",
    "commands": ["sh"],
    "terminal": true,
    "pause": true
  }
]

Built-in command sentinels

Sometimes the right action is in-process (no subprocess). Use one of these reserved strings for commands:

The shipped defaults use these for edit (synthesized at runtime), reveal, new window, system open, and add to project.

autoactions — pre-select an action by file type

Sometimes you want certain extensions to open without showing the menu. The autoactions setting matches files by endswith or pattern and pre-selects an action label from your *_custom_commands lists, either firing it immediately or pre-highlighting it in the menu.

Each entry:

Defaults shipped with Open URL:

"autoactions": [
  { "os": "windows", "endswith": [".exe", ".com"], "label": "run",  "action": "auto" },
  { "os": "windows", "endswith": [".bat", ".cmd"], "label": "run",  "action": "menu" },
  { "endswith": [".sublime-project"],              "label": "edit", "action": "auto" },
  { "endswith": [".txt", ".md", ".log", ".config", ".sublime-settings"],
    "label": "edit", "action": "auto" }
]

So a .md link auto-edits, a .sh link shows the menu pre-highlighting “run”, and .exe files on Windows just run.

URL / Path Transforms

Open URL applies these transforms to the selection before checking the file system:

• aliases — {} — string substitutions, applied first. Example: { "@db": "src/db/models" } lets you type @db/users and have it resolve to src/db/models/users.
• search_paths — ["src"] — directories prepended to the path.
• file_prefixes — [] — prefixes added to the basename.
• file_suffixes — [".js"] — suffixes (extensions) appended to the basename.

One path is generated for each combination of search_paths × file_prefixes × file_suffixes. The first one that resolves to an existing file or folder wins.

So with the defaults, typing users resolves to (in order): users, users.js, src/users, src/users.js. First file or folder that exists is opened.

Web search

If the selection isn't a file, folder, or URL, Open URL shows a panel of search engines, populated from the web_searchers setting. The first entry in the panel is always modify path, which lets you tweak the term and try resolving it again.

"web_searchers": [
  { "label": "google search", "url": "http://google.com/search?q=", "encoding": "utf-8" },
  { "label": "github code",   "url": "https://github.com/search?type=code&q=" }
]

Set web_searchers to [] if you'd rather have no search engines (only the modify-path entry remains).

Copy Transformed Path

If you set copy_path_transform to a shell command, Open URL: Copy Transformed Path pipes the current file's path through that command and copies the result. Copy Deep Link uses the same transform on the path portion.

{path} in the template is replaced with the shell-quoted file path; the command's stdout becomes the new path. If the command exits non-zero, Open URL shows the error in the status bar and doesn't touch the clipboard.

"copy_path_transform": "/opt/homebrew/bin/python3 ~/scripts/shortpath.py {path}"

The Copy Transformed Path palette entry is hidden when copy_path_transform is unset, so it doesn't clutter the palette unless you've configured it.

Paste Relative Path

Open URL: Paste Relative Path turns a clipboard path into the shortest of:

• a path relative to the currently open file (with symlinks resolved on both sides, so symlinks-into-Dropbox don't produce huge ../../../-chains)
• a ~/...-shortened absolute path
• the absolute path itself

Behavior:

• Web URLs (containing ://) are pasted as-is.
• file://... URIs are stripped first.
• Deep-link suffixes (:42, :/regex/, etc.) are preserved.
• In Markdown views, the result is wrapped in backticks (controlled by paste_relative_path_markdown_backticks).
• In non-Markdown views, results containing chars that would break re-selection (spaces, apostrophes, brackets, angle brackets, commas) are wrapped in a quote — ", else ', else ` — so the pasted link re-selects as one token.

Settings reference

Open with Preferences → Package Settings → Open URL → Settings.

Project-specific settings

Any of these settings can be overridden per project via the project file:

{
  "folders": [{ "path": "." }],
  "settings": {
    "open_url": {
      "search_paths": ["src", "lib"],
      "file_suffixes": [".tsx", ".ts"]
    }
  }
}

Project settings completely replace user settings for the keys they specify (no array deep-merge).

Disable default key bindings

Add "open_url.disable_default_key_bindings": true to your User Preferences.sublime-settings. All five Open URL bindings will become inactive; rebind them yourself in your User Default.sublime-keymap if you like.

Release notes

See version history.

Development

Tests run in plain Python (no Sublime Text instance required):

py test_open_url.py

The test suite is the only check. Lint and type-check tooling (isort, flake8, pyright) and the pre-push hook that ran them were removed — see docs/removed-dev-tooling.md to restore them.

If you use pyenv, the 3.8 version in .python-version won't match a real pyenv version directly. Install some 3.8.X and symlink: ln -s ~/.pyenv/versions/3.8.X ~/.pyenv/versions/3.8.

Credits

Author: @noahcoad. Long-time maintainer: @kylebebak.

Inspired by peterc's forum thread and KatsuomiK's gist.

See also: Noah's other Sublime Text packages.